McIlroy's return prompted the kind of slightly unreal euphoria that attends any major achievement by an Irish sportsman, whether from the north or the south, Protestant or Roman Catholic. The realisation that the violence in east Belfast was orchestrated by the Ulster Volunteer Force created a different kind of reaction: a mixture of dread and creeping anxiety about a possible return to the Troubles, an anxiety already stoked by a tense few months of sporadic activity by dissident Republicans following the murder of the PSNI officer, Ronan Kerr, in April.

Though the small coastal town of Holywood is just a short drive from inner city east Belfast, it is a world apart. McIlroy's success story has prompted an outburst of wishful thinking by columnists here and across the water. He is, we are told, the perfect role model for the province's youth, many of whom have come of age in the years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed in April 1998.

Tell that to the kids in balaclavas who wreaked havoc on the streets of east Belfast last week, and whose more realistic role models are much closer to home: the older men who orchestrated the violence and whose fearsome reputations count for nothing outside the communities that spawned them. Like their Republican counterparts in towns like Lurgan, where support for the Real IRA is strong, the youth of Protestant east Belfast feel that they have somehow been sold out by the mainstream parties that claim to represent them. They are economically disenfranchised, have little hope of ever finding meaningful employment and, in many instances, live in communities in which they have been brought up to hate the police and distrust their tribal opposites.

For most of the time, save for these sporadic outbursts of violence, they are also bored. For many young people in these areas, the worst years of the Troubles have been mythologised to the point where many feel they have missed out on the one thing that gives their lives any real meaning: the chance to fight for a cause they believe in. They provide fertile fodder for extremists. Reading between the headlines of the last week, it is easy to view Rory McIlroy's success story as the polar opposite of this lethally nostalgic mindset. He is an individual who, through hard work and great natural talent, has transcended the constraints of tribe, religion and loyalty. Brought up a Catholic, his success at golf, not that long ago a sport that was played almost exclusively by wealthy, middle-class Protestants, is interpreted by some as a dramatic sign of how much things have changed since the Troubles ended.

It would be misguided, though, to elevate McIlroy as a symbol of an emerging post-sectarian Northern Ireland just as much as it would be wrong to see the re-emergent UVF as a symbol of 21st-century Protestant working-class identity. Each, in their very different ways, are exceptions, even as they hint at the ways in which Northern Ireland remains a place still riven by tribal and religious loyalties. It's just that those loyalties now manifest themselves in some surprising ways and, one could argue, are fuelled by class as much as by belonging.

Recently, on a visit home, I fell into conversation with an old friend, and, inevitably, the talk touched on the good old bad old days of the Troubles. What surprised me was his insistence that, if anything, the province was more divided now than it had been back then. When I expressed surprise, he began to list the Protestant friends – and girlfriends – we had back then, even when it became risky to venture into each other's neighbourhoods. Things were different now, he insisted: although you could walk anywhere in Armagh without fear of harassment, the two communities remained divided, geographically and religiously by what he called "an unspoken mutual suspicion of the other".

He offered the example of his own children: middle-class, well-mannered teenagers who, like their parents, are pretty laissez-faire about their Catholicism; neither has any Protestant friends. This, he insisted, was the norm rather than the exception . It was nothing to do with sectarianism, it was simply how life was for a great part of the population. What's more, this "polite, middle-class, religious segregation" never made the headlines as it was all but invisible to outsiders.

As ever, life on the ground in Northern Ireland is more complex – and more encoded – than it has been painted by the media. A few years ago, the Observer's Ireland editor, Henry McDonald, wrote an illuminating blog about how the 11+ exam had survived after a fashion in the province despite being officially abolished by the education minister, Caítriona Ruane.

The majority of state Northern Irish grammar schools are attended by pupils who come from the Protestant/Unionist tradition so organised opposition to the abolition of the exam had come mainly from the two main Unionist parties. Several prominent Protestant grammar schools had gone so far as to draw up alternative, but similar, private entrance exams for 11-year-olds. More intriguingly, so too did several Roman Catholic grammar schools, confident of the support of parents. In this instance, a shared middle-class aspiration trumped religious and tribal loyalties.

The 11+ conundrum highlighted what McDonald called "the fascinating dichotomy" between the political thrust of Northern Ireland's Catholic middle class, many of whom, like their working-class counterparts, vote for Sinn Féin, and their social aspirations, which fit more readily into the centre-right political model offered by New Labour and honed by the current Lib-Con coalition government. Class is an overlooked issue in Northern Ireland, but, as in the rest of Britain, the distance between the haves and the have-nots is becoming increasingly wider.

Even Sinn Féin, whose politics were honed on the violent streets of working-class areas of Belfast, Derry and Armagh, are perceived as middle class by sections of nationalist communities that once supported them but now feel marginalised by Northern Ireland's ongoing, and still torturous, mainstream political process.

Unlike the rest of Britain, though, Northern Ireland has a history of violent paramilitarism that draws on the disaffected young, the politically and economically disenfranchised. Northern Ireland's golf clubs may well see a surge in youthful membership over the coming months, but the dissident extremist organisations on both sides have already provided evidence that sport is not the only option for the young and determined.